I have three photographs of Cairns railway station in the late 1940s: a two-storey building with cross-timbered balcony rails and the stark round face of a railway clock. A line of cars is parked tail-in along the front, all running boards and jutting bonnets and spoked wheels. The third photo, faded, shadowy, gives me a partial glimpse of the platform. It is narrow and open, with small round flowerbeds and thin light-poles; you can see the curved roofs of train carriages, and coal bunkers in the background.

But I am looking for the thin figure of a woman with a baby clutched to her side. I am trying to make out the shape of her, the set of her shoulders, her walk. The kind of shoes she had on. She had fine-shaped ankles, beautiful, all her life. That morning sixty years ago they carried her, the baby, a suitcase, the weight of all her fear and courage, along this strip of sunlit platform, this strip of bitumen that might be a line drawn between her two lives. Between her two selves: the one naive and hopeful, the other bitter and self-condemning, grieving, unable to forgive herself or the world for the loss of her child. I have spent much of my life trying to impress the one, and now I am trying to understand the other.